Tender Is the Night (35 page)

At the
desk he suddenly stared and upped his head. As if a drink were acting on him,
warming the lining of his stomach, throwing a flush up into his brain, he saw
the person he had come to see, the person for whom he had made the
Mediterranean crossing.

Simultaneously
Rosemary saw him, acknowledging him before placing him; she looked back
startled, and, leaving the girl she was with, she hurried over. Holding himself
erect, holding his breath, Dick turned to her. As she came across the lobby,
her beauty all groomed, like a young horse dosed with Black-seed oil, and hoops
varnished, shocked him awake; but it all came too quick for him to do anything
except conceal his fatigue as best he could. To meet her starry-eyed confidence
he mustered an insincere pantomime implying, “You WOULD turn up here—of all the
people in the world.”

Her
gloved hands closed over his on the desk; “Dick—we’re making The Grandeur that
was
Rome
—at
least we think we are; we may quit any day.”

He
looked at her hard, trying to make her a little self-conscious, so that she
would observe less closely his unshaven face, his crumpled and slept-in collar.
Fortunately, she was in a hurry.

“We
begin early because the mists rise at eleven—phone me at two.”

In his
room Dick collected his faculties. He left a call for
noon
, stripped off his clothes and dove
literally into a heavy sleep.

He slept
over the phone call but awoke at two, refreshed. Unpacking his bag, he sent out
suits and laundry. He shaved, lay for half an hour in a warm bath and had
breakfast. The sun had dipped into the Via
Nazionale
and he let it through the
portières
with a jingling
of old brass rings. Waiting for a suit to be pressed, he discovered from the
Corriere
della
Sera that “
una
novella
di
Sinclair Lewis
‘Wall Street’
nella
quale
autore
analizza
la
vita
sociale
di
una
piccola
citta
Americana
.”
Then he tried to think about Rosemary.

At first
he thought nothing. She was young and magnetic, but so was
Topsy
.
He guessed that she had had lovers and had loved them in the last four years.
Well, you never knew exactly how much space you occupied in people’s lives. Yet
from this fog his affection emerged—the best contacts are when one knows the
obstacles and still wants to preserve a relation. The past drifted back and he
wanted to hold her eloquent giving-of-herself in its precious shell, till he
enclosed it, till it no longer existed outside him. He tried to collect all
that might attract her—it was less than it had been four years ago. Eighteen
might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence; but twenty-two
would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity. Moreover, Dick had been at an
emotional peak at the time of the previous encounter; since then there had been
a lesion of enthusiasm.

When the
valet returned he put on a white shirt and collar and a black tie with a pearl;
the cords of his reading-glasses passed through another pearl of the same size
that swung a casual inch below. After sleep, his face had resumed the ruddy
brown of many
Riviera
summers, and to limber
himself
up he stood on his hands
on a chair until his fountain pen and coins fell out. At three he called
Rosemary and was bidden to come up. Momentarily dizzy from his acrobatics, he
stopped in the bar for a gin-and-tonic.

“Hi, Doctor Diver!”

Only
because of Rosemary’s presence in the hotel did Dick place the man immediately
as Collis Clay. He had his old confidence and an air of prosperity and big
sudden jowls.

“Do you
know Rosemary’s here?” Collis asked.

“I ran
into her.”

“I was
in
Florence
and
I heard she was here so I came down last week. You’d never know Mama’s little
girl.” He modified the remark, “I mean she was so carefully brought up and now
she’s a woman of the world—if you know what I mean. Believe me, has she got
some of these Roman boys tied up in bags!
And how!”

“
You studying
in
Florence
?”

“Me?
Sure, I’m studying architecture there. I go back Sunday—I’m staying for the
races.”

With
difficulty Dick restrained him from adding the drink to the account he carried
in the bar, like a stock-market report.

When
Dick got out of the elevator he followed a tortuous corridor and turned at
length toward a distant voice outside a lighted door. Rosemary was in black
pajamas; a luncheon table was still in the room; she was having coffee.

“You’re
still beautiful,” he said.
“A little more beautiful than
ever.”

“Do you
want coffee, youngster?”

“I’m
sorry I was so
unpresentable
this morning.”

“You
didn’t look well—you all right now? Want coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“You’re
fine again, I was scared this morning. Mother’s coming over next month, if the
company stays. She always asks me if I’ve seen you over here, as if she thought
we were living next door. Mother always liked you—she always felt you were
some one
I ought to know.”

“Well,
I’m glad she still thinks of me.”

“Oh, she
does,” Rosemary reassured him.
“A very great deal.”

“I’ve
seen you here and there in pictures,” said Dick. “Once I had Daddy’s Girl run
off just for
myself
!”

“I have
a good part in this one if it isn’t cut.”

She
crossed behind him, touching his shoulder as she passed. She phoned for the
table to be taken away and settled in a big chair.

“I was
just a little girl when I met you, Dick. Now I’m a woman.”

“I want
to hear everything about you.”

“How
is
Nicole—and Lanier and
Topsy
?”

“They’re
fine. They often speak of you—”

The phone
rang. While she answered it Dick examined two novels— one by Edna Ferber, one
by Albert
McKisco
. The waiter came for the table;
bereft of its presence Rosemary seemed more alone in her black pajamas.

“. . . I
have a caller. . . . No, not very well. I’ve got to go to the costumer’s for a
long fitting. . . . No, not now . . .”

As
though with the disappearance of the table she felt released, Rosemary smiled
at Dick—
that smile
as if they two together had managed
to get rid of all the trouble in the world and were now at peace in their own
heaven . . .

“That’s
done,” she said. “Do you realize I’ve spent the last hour getting ready for
you?”

But
again the phone called her. Dick got up to change his hat from the bed to the
luggage stand, and in alarm Rosemary put her hand over the mouthpiece of the
phone. “You’re not going!”

“No.”

When the
communication was over he tried to drag the afternoon together saying: “I
expect some nourishment from people now.”

“Me
too,” Rosemary agreed. “The man that just phoned me once knew a second cousin
of mine. Imagine calling anybody up for a reason like that!”

Now she
lowered the lights for love. Why else should she want to shut off his view of
her? He sent his words to her like letters, as though they left him some time
before they reached her.

“Hard to sit here and be close to you, and not kiss you.”
Then they kissed passionately in
the centre of the floor. She pressed against him, and went back to her chair.

It could
not go on being merely pleasant in the room. Forward or backward; when the
phone rang once more he strolled into the bedchamber and lay down on her bed,
opening Albert
McKisco’s
novel. Presently Rosemary
came in and sat beside him.

“You
have the longest eyelashes,” she remarked.

“We are
now
back
at the Junior Prom. Among those present
are
Miss Rosemary Hoyt, the eyelash fancier—”

She
kissed him and he pulled her down so that they lay side by side, and then they
kissed till they were both breathless. Her breathing was young and eager and
exciting. Her lips were faintly chapped but soft in the corners.

When
they were still limbs and feet and clothes, struggles of his arms and back, and
her throat and breasts, she whispered, “No, not now—those things are rhythmic.”

Disciplined
he crushed his passion into a corner of his mind, but bearing up her fragility
on his arms until she was poised half a foot above him, he said lightly:

“Darling—that
doesn’t matter.”

Her face
had changed with his looking up at it; there was the eternal moonlight in it.

“That
would be poetic justice if it should be you,” she said. She twisted away from
him, walked to the mirror, and boxed her disarranged hair with her hands.
Presently she drew a chair close to the bed and stroked his cheek.

“Tell me
the truth about you,” he demanded.

“I
always have.”

“In a
way—but nothing hangs together.”

They
both laughed but he pursued.

“Are you
actually a virgin?”

“No-o-o!”
she sang. “I’ve slept with six hundred and forty men—if that’s the answer you
want.”

“It’s
none of my business.”

“Do you
want me for a case in psychology?”

“Looking
at you as a perfectly normal girl of twenty-two, living in the year
nineteen twenty-eight
, I guess
you’ve taken a few shots at love.”

“It’s
all been—abortive,” she said.

Dick
couldn’t believe her. He could not decide whether she was deliberately building
a barrier between them or whether this was intended to make an eventual
surrender more significant.

“Let’s
go walk in the
Pincio
,” he suggested.

He shook
himself straight in his clothes and smoothed his hair. A moment had come and
somehow passed. For three years Dick had been the ideal by which Rosemary
measured other men and inevitably his stature had increased to heroic size. She
did not want him to be like other men, yet here were the same exigent demands,
as if he wanted to take some of
herself
away, carry it
off in his pocket.

Walking
on the greensward between cherubs and philosophers, fauns and falling water,
she took his arm snugly, settling into it with a series of little
readjustments, as if she wanted it to be right because it was going to be there
forever. She plucked a twig and broke it, but she found no spring in it.
Suddenly seeing what she wanted in Dick’s face she took his gloved hand and
kissed it. Then she cavorted childishly for him until he smiled and she laughed
and they began having a good time.

“I can’t
go out with you to-night, darling, because I promised some people a long time
ago. But if you’ll get up early I’ll take you out to the set to-morrow.”

He dined
alone at the hotel, went to bed early, and met Rosemary in the lobby at
half-past six. Beside him in the car she glowed away fresh and new in the
morning sunshine. They went out through the
Porta
San
Sebastiano
and along the
Appian
Way
until they came to the huge set of the forum, larger than the
forum itself. Rosemary turned him over to a man who led him about the great
props; the arches and tiers of seats and the sanded arena. She was working on a
stage which represented a guard-room for Christian prisoners, and presently
they went there and watched
Nicotera
, one of many
hopeful
Valentinos
, strut and pose before a dozen
female “captives,” their eyes melancholy and startling with mascara.

Rosemary
appeared in a knee-length tunic.

“Watch
this,” she whispered to Dick. “I want your opinion. Everybody that’s seen the rushes
says—”

“What
are the rushes?”

“When
they run off what they took the day before. They say it’s the first thing I’ve
had sex appeal in.”

“I don’t
notice it.”

“You
wouldn’t! But I have.”

Nicotera
in his leopard skin talked attentively to Rosemary while the electrician
discussed something with the director, meanwhile leaning on him. Finally the
director pushed his hand off roughly and wiped a sweating forehead, and Dick’s
guide remarked: “He’s on the hop again, and how!”

“Who?”
asked Dick, but before the man could answer the director walked swiftly over to
them.

“Who’s
on the hop—you’re on the hop yourself.” He spoke vehemently to Dick, as if to a
jury. “When he’s on the hop he always thinks everybody else is, and how!” He
glared at the guide a moment longer,
then
he clapped
his hands: “All right—everybody on the set.”